PORTLAND, Ore. — Opponents of the Rose Quarter Improvement Project have filed a second lawsuit aiming to block the Oregon Department of Transportation's plan to widen a section of Interstate 5 through inner Northeast Portland — though not the portion of the project that would add a cover on top of the freeway through the corridor.
"In an age of evident climate change, every dollar we put into expanding freeways is just digging the hole deeper," said Chris Smith, co-founder of the group No More Freeways. "We should be spending money on things that reduce carbon and move people around in a more sustainable manner."
No More Freeways is one of six advocacy groups that filed the lawsuit; the others are Neighbors for Clean Air, the Association of Oregon Rail and Transit Advocates, Oregon Families for Safe Streets and BikeLoudPDX. Most of those groups were also behind a previous lawsuit filed in May.
The first lawsuit argued that the current design of the Rose Quarter project violates the climate goals in Portland's Comprehensive Plan and Metro's Regional Transportation Plan. The second lawsuit alleges that the project plan also violates federal environmental standards and contends that ODOT should be required to put the project through a full-scale federal environmental review process.
"A win in this case would be to pause the project and do a full Environmental Impact Statement," Smith said. "And importantly, analyze other alternatives. So we'd like to look at a transit alternative, we'd like to look at a (congestion) pricing alternative, we would like to look at a less expensive alternative."
So far, the project has only had to go through a more limited federal environmental review, winning federal approval in 2020. ODOT was forced to restart the process in early 2022 after making some design changes, but it was still only required to do the more limited review, and the agency once again got a federal green light earlier this year.
The cover project
ODOT's primary goal for the $1.5-1.9 billion project is to address a major regional bottleneck by adding one more lane in each direction to I-5 through the Rose Quarter and widening the freeway shoulders. The addition of a freeway cover started off as a peripheral piece, but gradually expanded into a major component.
ODOT's initial plan only had a pair of small and light covers near the Broadway and Weidler overpasses, but a wide range of local advocacy groups and elected officials pushed for one big cover through more of the corridor, built strong enough to support buildings on top. Their goal was to reconnect the historically Black Albina neighborhood, which was split in half when I-5 was built.
The original small-covers plan lost the support of both the city of Portland and the group Albina Vision Trust in 2020, but both parties came back on board two years later after the agency switched to the current expanded cover design.
The groups behind the lawsuits have continued to object to the project on environmental grounds, but they've made it clear that they do support the cover, just not the freeway widening. A Monday news release from the groups reiterated that point, calling on officials to "decouple" the cover from the widening project and pursue it separately.
"We hope this legal action spurs policymakers to join us in recognizing the divergence of these two separate projects, and encourages them to double down on healing the neighborhood instead of paving it over," said Allan Rudwick, chair of the Eliot Neighborhood Association. "My neighbors don't like that air quality in the area has been ignored for generations and they don't like the lack of action they see with the Rose Quarter Freeway Expansion project in front of us now."
The financial situation
The lawsuits come at a time when the project has been regaining momentum after running up against a funding wall last year. The combination of the larger cover and pandemic-era inflation pushed the project's cost way up, and Gov. Tina Kotek's decision to cancel plans to toll Portland-area freeways deprived ODOT of an expected source of revenue, and the agency had to shift some existing funding away from the Rose Quarter to finish other projects.
Those impacts left the Rose Quarter in a tight financial spot until earlier this year, when the U.S. Department of Transportation announced earlier this year that it would kick in $488 million for the cover project from its Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods program, with $450 million going to ODOT for the cover project and the remainder going to the Portland Bureau of Transportation to make improvements to the streetscape on top.
ODOT was quick to declare that the new funding would allow the overall Rose Quarter project to move forward, but the federal award is still far short of the estimated $1.3 billion funding gap that the broader project faces, and ODOT noted that it would likely need to ask the Oregon Legislature for more money next year.
Earlier this month, the Metro Council voted to break the Rose Quarter project into specific phases, with the bulk of the new federal money being used to fund design and construction of "Phase 1," which includes removal of the current Broadway and Weidler Street overpasses and construction of the central portion of the freeway cover to replace them.
ODOT declined to comment on the lawsuit, but pointed to an earlier statement that made it clear that the agency views the freeway cover and expansion as one project, calling it "an opportunity to not only improve our state's worst bottleneck and highest crash site but to also reconnect the Albina neighborhood."
Next steps
At an Oregon Transportation Committee meeting earlier this month, ODOT Urban Mobility Office director Brendan Finn explained that the agency has applied for another $750 million in funding from the federal INFRA grant program, with a pledged $250 million state match, and expects to hear back in about the next month.
Landing the full grant would enable ODOT to proceed with the entire project, he said, with construction starting in 2025 on some of the peripheral freeway components and construction on the cover beginning in 2027.
But he also outlined two alternative scenarios in the event that the grant doesn't come through. If ODOT can't find any additional funding and has to make do with just the existing $450 million grant, it will only be able to build the southern half of the cover, with the rest of the project on hold. If ODOT doesn't get the full INFRA grant but does manage to find some other, smaller source of additional funding, the priority would be to finish the full cover, he added.
However, those more limited plans would still be structured to allow the full project to be completed at some point in the future, including by widening and deepening the freeway corridor underneath the cover to make space for the extra lanes — a plan that has drawn criticism from opponents of the freeway expansion portion of the project. Testifying at the meeting, Joe Cortright from City Observatory called the limited cover plan a "bait and switch."
"You represented to the federal government that you would have a deluxe version of covers, that would cover a much larger area, and you got $450 million, the largest grant in the country," he said. "And now you’re proposing paring that back to just a fraction of the area that you said you would cover, and spending the RCN money, the money the federal government gave you for covers, on widening the freeway."